20 films selected for 62nd Cannes Film Festival

Agencies - May 17, 2009

The 62nd Cannes Film Festival, which began on Wednesday, with Disney/Pixar’s animation ‘Up’, has received more than 4000 films. Names of the twenty officially selected films for awards are given below:

Bright Star:  London 1818: a secret love affair begins between 23 year old English poet, John Keats, and the girl next door, Fanny Brawne, an outspoken student of fashion. This unlikely pair started at odds; he thinking her a stylish minx, she unimpressed by literature in general. It was the illness of Keats’s younger brother that drew them together. Keats was touched by Fanny’s efforts to help and agreed to teach her poetry. By the time Fanny’s alarmed mother and Keats’s best friend Brown realised their attachment, the relationship had an unstoppable momentum. Intensely and helplessly absorbed in each other, the young lovers were swept into powerful new sensations, ‘I have the feeling as if I were dissolving’, Keats wrote to her. Together they rode a wave of romantic obsession that deepened as their troubles mounted. Only  

Keats’s illness proved insurmountable.

Broken Embraces:  A man writes, lives and loves in darkness. Fourteen years before, he was in a brutal car crash on the island of Lanzarote. In the accident, he did not lose only his sight, he also lost Lena, the love of his life.

This man uses two names: Harry Caine, a playful pseudonym with which he signs his literary works, stories and scripts, and Mateo Blanco, his real name, with which he lives and signs the film he directs. After the accident, Mateo Blanco reduces himself to his pseudonym, Harry Caine. If he cannot direct films he can only survive with the idea that Mateo Blanco died on Lanzarote with his beloved Lena.

Antichrist: A grieving couple retreat to ’Eden’, their isolated cabin in the woods, where they hope to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse...

1. À L’origine (In the Beginning), directed by Xavier Giannoli, France
2. Antichrist, directed by Lars Von Trier, Italy
3. Bak-Jwi (Thirst), directed by Park Chan-Wook, South Korea
4. Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion, Australia
5. Chun Feng Chen Zui De Ye Wan (Spring Fever), directed by Lou Ye, France
6. Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon), directed by Michael Haneke, Italy
7. Enter the Void, directed by Gaspar Noé, Italy
8. Fish Tank, directed by Andrea Arnold, United Kingdom
9. Inglourious Basterds (Inglourious Basterds), directed by Quentin Tarantino, United States of America
10. Kinatay, directed by Brillante Mendoza, France
11. Les Herbes Folles (Wild Grass), directed by Alain Resnais, France
12. Looking For Eric, directed by Ken Loach, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Belgium and Spain
13. Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces), directed by Pedro Almodóvar, Spain
14. Map Of The Sounds Of Tokyo, directed by Isabel Coixet, Spain
15. Taking Woodstock, directed by Ang Lee, United States of America
16. The Time That Remains, directed by Elia Suleiman, France, Belgium, Italy and United Kingdom
17. Un Prophète (A Prophet), directed by Jacques Audiard, France
18. Vengeance, directed by Johnnie To, Hong Kong
19. Vincere, directed by Marco Bellocchio, Italy
20. Visage (Face), directed by Tsai Ming-Liang, Taiwan, France, Belgium and Netherlands

Source: http://www.newagebd.com